On The Edge

Philadelphia native and arch noise provocateur M Ax Noi Mach, aka Robert Francisco, releases On The Edge; his first full-length LP in six years after 2010’s In the Shadows.

Recorded once again with the help of Arthur Rizk (Prurient, Power Trip, Cold World, etc) at Salomons Gate in 2014, this new record chronicles some of M Ax Noi Mach’s heaviest, most intense recordings to date; their minimal, bare immediacy comes from primal desires brought to a boiling point in the US city he calls his home.

“M Ax Noi Mach has always been a primal endeavour,” Francisco told Noisey in an interview last year, “and it definitely comes from a private place. I’ve always had a fire inside of me; I’ve always had a feeling that I’ve had to release. Pure intuition. Pure rage, the animal let out of the cage.”

Musical touchstones on this 8-track album move from Nurse With Wound through Prurient and SPK. It’s an unholy, clamorous din spewed up from the bowels of hell. It’s the industrial trepanning of your psyche. The crunchy distortion of ‘Walking at Night’, album highlight ‘Second Glance’ and ‘Indulgence’, deal in anguished, hateful vocals - with words spat out like flames of fury. Then there’s the relentlessly abrasive drone of ‘Surrounded’, the muted, glossolalia-like mutterings of ‘American Child’ and the warped synth poetics of ‘White Heat’; all in all, a visceral, brutal record that absolutely refuses to let up.

The shadowy Robert Francisco has been a vital artist in the US underground since the late 1990s. He has done time in the power electronics unit Angeldust as well as Veiled (with Arnau Sala of Exoteric Continent and the Anomia label.)

But M Ax Noi Mach is the nexus of his poetic, visual, and sonic pursuits: his discography stretches back to 1999 and his immensely powerful live show has gained the project legendary status in electronic music circles across Europe and the US. The defining principle of M Ax Noi Mach's sound is that it has resisted easy genre categorisation, remaining a singular rock through waves of American underground culture; in it, the shattered pieces of several strategies of urban, extreme musics cohere in a way that only Francisco can envision.